Animator

The Animator component drives a SpriteRenderer by cycling through an Animation's Sprite frames automatically. Attach it to a SpriteRenderer and it handles frame advancement every tick.

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Setup

The animation pipeline now separates generated raw animation assets from per-instance playback parameters. GIFs are converted into WE_AnimationRaw assets (see documentation/asset_pipeline.md). At runtime you wrap a raw asset with playback settings into a WE_Animation and pass that to the Animator.

Example:

// Generated by the asset pipeline:
//   extern const WE_AnimationRaw PLAYER_WALK;

// In game code — wrap the raw asset with playback params:
constexpr WE_Animation WALK = { &Assets::PLAYER_WALK, 8, true };

class Player : public GameObject {
public:
    SpriteRenderer spriteRenderer = SpriteRenderer(this, &Assets::PLAYER, RenderLayer::Player);
    Animator       animator       = Animator(&spriteRenderer, &WALK);
};

The engine ticks the animator automatically every frame. Pixel arrays and Sprite objects remain constexpr (flash-resident); WE_Animation is a small, constexpr wrapper that holds the raw asset pointer and playback params.

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Constructor

Animator(SpriteRenderer*  mySpriteRenderer,
         const WE_Animation* animation);

Parameter	Description
mySpriteRenderer	The SpriteRenderer this animator controls
animation	The WE_Animation wrapper to play (contains raw, frameDuration, looping)

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Controls

Switching Animations

Swap the active animation at runtime — for example switching from walk to jump:

animator.setAnimation(JUMP);

This resets the frame counter and starts the new animation from the beginning.

Jumping to a Frame

Jump to a specific frame immediately — resets the tick counter:

animator.setFrame(0); // go back to first frame

Playback Speed

Change how many ticks each frame is shown for:

animator.setFrameDuration(4);  // faster
animator.setFrameDuration(16); // slower

Pause and Resume

animator.pause();
animator.resume();

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Getters

animator.getCurrentFrame(); // returns current frame index
animator.isPaused();        // returns true if paused

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Frame Duration and Speed

frameDuration is measured in engine ticks, not milliseconds. At 30fps:

frameDuration	Frames per second
2	15 fps
4	7.5 fps
8	3.75 fps
15	2 fps

Adjust based on how snappy you want the animation to feel.

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Memory

All pixel data, Sprite arrays, and Animation objects should be declared constexpr so they live in flash. The Animator itself only stores pointers and counters — a few bytes of RAM regardless of frame count.